A single entry point with n stacked control-flow blocks — nested if/else, a bounded inner loop with break/continue, and a switch — all mutating a small set of carried locals (a, b, c, d). Re-assigning the same locals across many branches and loop back-edges is what forces SSA construction to insert phi nodes and what the CFG simplifier (constructSSA, inside simplifyIR) must chew through. Isolates the SSA/CFG axis that complexity_ladder only touches as one of several mixed dimensions; nothing else stresses it alone. Scales by breadth = number of control-flow blocks, so basic-block and phi counts grow with n. Scaling null: n scales control-flow blocks; ideal SSA construction is near-linear in block count.
bucket: control_flow · mode: target · flags: -target spirv -emit-spirv-directly
compileInner split into phase buckets (named leaves + (self) residuals) stacked across the sweep sizes — the top edge is compileInner, so you can see which phase drives the scaling.
floor-subtracted power-law fit (t − floor) = a·Nk; floor = the minimal workload (fixed per-compile cost), k the global exponent, top-2× the local high-end doubling ratio.
| N range | floor (ms) | k (work) | fit R² | t(Nmin) | t(Nmax) | top-2× |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 60–480 | 9 | 1.28 | 0.993 | 126 | 1665 | 2.83× |
compileInner grows by 1539 ms across the sweep; the mutually-exclusive phase buckets below partition that growth exactly (no nested-timer double counting). × lin is the same metric as the top-level panels, per bucket: the end point vs a linear expectation anchored to the bucket's share of the minimal floor and fitted on the low-N half — 1.0 = grew exactly linearly, >1 bends up. The super-linearity lives where × lin (and k) are red.
| bucket | t@N=60 | t@N=480 | Δ ms | share | × lin | ∝Nk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| generateOutput (self) | 31 | 567 | +536 | 35% | 2.05× | 1.43 |
| linkAndOptimizeIR (self) | 13 | 526 | +513 | 33% | 3.39× | 1.79 |
| generateIR | 13 | 160 | +147 | 10% | 1.62× | 1.22 |
| simplifyIR | 13 | 125 | +111 | 7% | 1.17× | 1.08 |
| SemanticChecking | 46 | 147 | +101 | 7% | 0.60× | 0.59 |
Also growing (below top-5): performMandatoryEarlyInlining (+78 ms, 5%).
Near-constant (≤2% of growth each): specializeModule (3→25 ms), legalizeExistentialTypeLayout (1→11 ms), legalizeResourceTypes (1→11 ms), linkIR (1→7 ms), parseTranslationUnit (1→5 ms), performForceInlining (0→2 ms), unrollLoopsInModule (0→1 ms), frontEndExecute (self) (0→0 ms), compileInner (self) (0→0 ms).
| N | compileInner | simplifyIR | frontEndExecute |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 | 126 | 13 | 60 |
| 120 | 246 | 27 | 86 |
| 240 | 589 | 57 | 147 |
| 480 | 1665 | 125 | 312 |